Soon afterward, Mary B. Clay invited Lucy Stone to stay at her mother Mary Jane Warfield Clay's house in Lexington, and Stone mentored the creation of the Fayette County Equal Suffrage Association (later the Fayette County Equal Rights Association[2]).

On November 22, 1888, delegates from Fayette and Kenton counties joined the four daughters of the former abolitionist Cassius M. Clay – Anne, Sally, Mary and Laura – to create the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA).

Kentucky had already pointed the way for this strategy when in 1838 a statewide law passed protecting the right of female taxpaying heads-of-households in rural areas to vote on matters related to the new common school system.

Farmer of Kenton County Equal Rights Association alerted the state leaders of the possibility of inserting school suffrage into the new charters for second class cities in Kentucky, specifically in Lexington, Newport and Covington.

The legislature allowed for this, in 1894, for all women in those three cities to have the right to vote in local school board elections and educational matters.

[5] Despite the aggressive petitioning and lobbying by a coalition of white women's groups to keep it, the legislature rescinded the partial suffrage law in Kentucky in January 1902.

This law was tested in the courts and stood, allowing for state protection of the right for black and white women citizens to vote.

The idea was to assure conservative locals that giving women the right to vote would guarantee victory for prohibition as well as other social improvements.

As part of their efforts to protect children, especially those living in poverty and victims of domestic violence, the KERA lobbied for and won legislation in 1896 to establish reform schools for both girls and boys.

The KERA won Kentucky's child labor law, despite the agrarian and mining business interests, and raised the age of consent from 12 to 16.

The National American Woman Suffrage Association, determined to impress Southern legislators with the urgency of their cause, decided to tour the South.

In 1894, Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt started out from Lexington, Kentucky, on their tour and stopped in Wilmore, Louisville, Owensboro (where they formed a local club for the KERA) and Paducah.

On January 14, 1914, Breckinridge and Clay addressed the Kentucky legislature in joint session in celebration of the woman's suffrage bills finally moving out of committee.